MySpace’s huge popularity and fame has not come without a cost. As the social networking site has swelled to enormous numbers, high-profile problems involving young users have led to complaints that the company has not been doing its rightful and responsible share in the fight against sexual predators online.
On Monday, the News Corp.-owned Web giant took a step towards quieting those grievances when it announced that it was going to open its database of sex offenders in the U.S. to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).
The NCMEC tracks missing children in the U.S. and plans to use the data that MySpace will open up to them to assist law enforcement groups with their investigations.
MySpace and Sentinel Tech Holdings Corp. created a technology that merges sex offender information from individual states to help police forces track about 600,000 convicted sex offenders.
The two companies combined efforts in December, and have enabled the identification, blocking and/or deletion of accounts that are owned by sex offenders in the registries.
LexisNexis provides the information to Sentinel, and photo-matching software is also utilized to help identify offenders in photos.
Despite this positive development, there are still those that are not appeased.
Some critics are demanding that the social networking site take steps towards verifying the true ages of the members on MySpace, and that the minimum age should be raised from 16 to 18-years of age.
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate are pushing for the registration of a valid e-mail address from all convicted sex offenders.
Sources:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070129/wr_nm/myspace_sexoffender_
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